SwimSwam Podcast: Chris Ballard on Ice Swimming, Cold Water, and The Plunge

GMM by @SwimOutletTV
Ice swimming is a strange outpost on the edge of our sport. It’s real, growing, and intense, but still outside the formal World Aquatics structure. In this GMM takeover of the SwimSwam Podcast, we sit down with Chris Ballard, author of THE PLUNGE: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water. The book drops June 9th from Simon & Schuster.

Ballard, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and an award-winning author, does not dip a toe into this icy world and call it reporting. He spent three years writing the book, chasing cold water across Norway, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Boston, and Copenhagen, training inside the culture instead of merely observing it. Along the way, he became an age-group national champion in ice swimming and raced at the World Championships in Italy, with mentorship from legendary cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox.

If you’ve read Born To Run, you’ll love The Plunge. This is not a wellness cash-grab. It is immersive journalism, a great literary prestige journey you want to take. Ballard put his own body into the experiment to understand why people keep coming back to cold water, what separates pool swimming, open water, and ice swimming, and why this niche corner of the sport has become a global curiosity.

Our conversation covers why he took-on this suffering, and we dig into the science without getting too deep in the weeds. Ballard’s sober and impartial discussing research around dopamine, noradrenaline, cortisol, and stress response, along with the idea that cold exposure can produce measurable changes in mood, resilience, and long-term health. He gets into one of the more compelling paradoxes in the research: cold water can leave people feeling both alert and relaxed at the same time. He also talks through the idea of “healthy hardship,” where brief, controlled stress can sharpen the body and mind rather than wear them down.

The strongest narrative thread in this conversation is cultural. Ballard reports that cold-water swimming has grown because modern life has become too frictionless, and people are hungry for real adversity. And in that extreme discomfort, he finds something swimmers already know well: a strong sense of clarity and community.

I hope you like our conversation. If you have questions I missed, drop them in the comments.

Many thanks to Swimoutlet.com for their 14 year partnership and support of this swimming news and media.

Chris’s bio: Chris Ballard, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for twenty years, is the award-winning author of four books, including One Shot at Forever.

Credit: THE PLUNGE by Chris Ballard. Text copyright (c) 2026 by Chris Ballard. Any quotes or reprints are by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

Image Credit: DeepBlue MEdia/Georgio Scala, curtesy of IISA®

Swimming news courtesy of SwimSwam.com (swimswam.com)

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This is a Gold Medal Media production presented by SwimOutlet.com. Host Gold Medal Mel Stewart is a 3-time Olympic medalist and the co-founder of SwimSwam.com, a Swimming News website.

Opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the interviewed guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the hosts, SwimSwam Partners, LLC and/or SwimSwam advertising partners.